Tom Bradby: from ITN News to a cinema near you

For his first foray into film, Tom Bradby revisits the sectarian tensions of
Northern Ireland, where he was a TV reporter. Jasper Rees reports.

ITN's political editor Tom BradbyPhoto: Andrew Crowley

By Jasper Rees

7:43AM BST 23 Aug 2012

'When you see McGuinness shaking hands with the Queen, you genuinely think anything is possible in life.” Tom Bradby is in the unique position to speak about the handshake of the decade with two hats on. For some of the 1990s, he was ITN’s man in Northern Ireland, reporting on the UK’s own attritional war on terror. But one of his more recent beats has been as royal correspondent, a job he took after being shot in the leg in Jakarta.

When Prince William and Kate Middleton gave a lone interview on the occasion of their engagement, it was Bradby popping the questions. Indeed, he and his wife were invited to the nuptials.

ITN’s political editor has now added another string to his bow. Already the author of half a dozen thrillers, he has rewritten one of them as a screenplay. Shadow Dancer opens next month, and it is an impressively taut thriller. No prizes for guessing which of Bradby’s two beats it’s set in. The plot features a young female republican mole and her male MI5 handler, and engulfs them in the world of intrigue in which both the IRA and the intelligence services are riven with internecine skulduggery.

“When I very first had the idea for Shadow Dancer,” Bradby elucidates, “what appealed to me was the extraordinary situation of running an agent. Let’s just say it was a guy and a young woman who are going to be pushed into a very intense relationship where, if he makes a mistake, she is dead. What would they feel about each other?”

With Andrea Riseborough and Clive Owen in the lead roles, these nuances are as intricately wired as a sophisticated explosive device. Riseborough plays Collette, a young mother who is also the member of a tight-knit republican family. Caught planting a bomb in London, she is offered the option by a handler known only as Mac of either going to prison and missing her son’s childhood, or becoming an informer for the enemy.

“I was always fascinated by the fact that if you’re politically motivated enough to join the IRA or the Loyalist paramilitaries, what on earth would make you go and work for the British state? How did that happen?”

Research revealed that almost anything could make a turncoat out of a paramilitary: sexual jealousy, a missed promotion, financial need, blackmail. This fascination with the human impact of the conflict on its most involved participants gripped Bradby as a journalist from the start.

“But the day-to-day reality of that intense and intimate war is something there was no place to talk about on the news. I wanted to find other means to express it.”

Shadow Dancer was published just before the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and for a long time there was no thought of a film. Then, a few years ago, Bradby found himself in conversation with his friend and the film’s eventual producer, Chris Coen, about The Lives of Others, set in the even grimmer yesteryear of communist East Berlin. Bradby seized the moment.

“If you like that,” he suggested, “you should look at Shadow Dancer. It’s got a simple mechanism, a very interesting premise and I think the time is right to look back at a historical conflict.”

Whether it really is the right time remains to be seen. Bradby recalls that as a Belfast reporter he had to keep the phone at the other end of his flat to insulate himself at night from what he calls “the drumbeat of death”.

Memories of “those rain-soaked streets where you could almost scrape the misery off the pavements” are now fading. Do cinemagoers really want to go back? He and director James Marsh have designed it, he argues, as a universal portrait of civil conflict that just happens to belong to the recent history of these islands.

“It would have been to the film’s commercial disadvantage had it come out in 1999. One of the difficulties I faced with it as a book was we were at the end of a conflict about which people were very tired. There was just a degree of ennui that there was no getting away from. That’s now a long time ago and a whole new generation doesn’t actually know anything about this conflict. The time and distance and the fact that Northern Ireland has moved on allows a bit of perspective and a chance to look with new eyes.”

It is also to Shadow Dancer’s advantage that younger people are less likely to see it through a partisan prism. That may make it easier to root for, say, a British audience to empathise with Riseborough’s conflicted republican, and an Irish one to see the humanity in Owen’s government handler. When the film was shown to a hand-picked audience in Belfast, “we had IRA hunger strikers and people on the other side standing up to say how much they liked it. I think part of that is because we somehow managed to drain all the politics out of it.”

Although he has no wish to do himself out of sales, Bradby concedes that the film is “probably better” than the many-stranded book. That is in part down to the many hours spent debating every narrative avenue with Marsh, whose best-known films are the documentaries Project Nim and the Oscar-winning Man on Wire. Together they keep you guessing about the relationship’s precarious balance of power to the very last frame.

“We debated the end up until a few hours before it was shot. James’s tendency was more towards ambiguity and mine was more towards certainty, and we’ve met in a very interesting place in the middle. Films that deliver twists at the end which feel genuine and emotionally satisfying are very rare and we strove for that. Anyone can throw in a surprise like a deus ex machina. If we’re going to have surprises, they’ve got to leave the audience feeling satisfied, not cheated.”